Some of you might have been affected by ChemSpider service outages over the weekend. We are used to experiencing outages as a result of power cuts or internet service provider outages. Unfortunately this one is our of our making. There were numerous things going on over the weekend and we were hoping for only slight interruptions. We have had to add another terabyte of storage to the system and needed to pull down the system to put the drives in place. Also, we are in the process of rebuilding our index for the Chemrefer service and this is putting a strain on our servers. Add to this the fact that Google appear to be indexing all of our InChIKeys (we estimate about 10,000 transactions per day on the server just from this indexing process). As commented previously ChemSpider runs skinny and we don’t have an enormous rack of servers, we are limited to 3. We apologize for the outages but until we can afford to have ChemSpider run as a hosted service this may happen from time to time.

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Rich…I did ask a contact at Google to see if he could influence the directing of Goggle indexing towards us. He was very helpful in providing feedback on optimizing URLs and I believe you are conscious of those efforts. I think actually it was simply a matter of time. We have not yet deposited a sitemap to them so we’re glad indexing has started.

Joerg..we are moving the indexing jobs offline and are at that time where we have to add yet another computer to our system. Thanks to our two sponsors (ANYONE ELSE WANT TO HELP?) we can afford one right now…

[...] in on itself the first few times I tried this but now it is not too bad. ChemRefer also managed to crash ChemSpider last weekend (oops).Â Anyway, below is the embryonic version of this feature which will form part [...]